I've been thinking about the term "outsider artist" lately. When it was coined, the artworld (and in particular, for our purposes, the music world) was unrecognizably different from how it is today. I'm beginning to think that a lot of us could consider ourselves outsider artists and maybe that would be a fruitful response to our present predicament. A rambling monologue follows, but I promise some nice pictures to go with it.

I was led to this by stumbling on a very nice little video essay about Henry Darger on YouTube. I first encountered Darger nearly two decades ago on a visit to New York's American Folk Art Museum, which at the time was exhibiting a number of his large-scale, double-sided works. They made a big impression on me by being unlike anything I'd ever seen before (or since, as it goes).

They have something in common with everything else I'm going to talk about in this post: they get a kind of intense energy from being the undiluted work of a person who simply did not care what people thought of his work because nobody but him would ever see it. Or maybe that's too much to claim, perhaps he hoped to reach an audience one day, but the fact is he never did and never, so far as I know, really tried to. Yet he worked away on his art for many years. He made his work for an audience of one and that meant he never needed to make a single compromise except, I suppose, of the budgetary kind (Darger was very poor, which makes the high prices his pictures now command even more grotesque than they would be otherwise).

I'm going to make the case that a lot of us ought to think of ourselves more like Darger and less like the "pros" that social media often encourages us to look to. Before I get into that, though, I want to make this about AI. Stay with me a sec.

Everyone engaged in an activity that involves making something digital is having to think about how generative AI impacts what they do, now and in a hypothesized future when those tools get "better". I'm a bit skeptical about how much better they're going to get but I've been wrong about such things before and anyway they're already much better than I'd have imagined ten years ago. I recently watched this short video that pretty much sums up my view of where we're at now in early 2025.

I've been saying for a while that if your art is going to be replaced by AI, it was probably corporate slop all along. What I mean is that current generative AI tools are designed to converge on the most middle-of-the-road, lifeless, commercial pap they can. That's an inevitable consequence of the methods being used -- those giant nuclear-powered datacentres being built everywhere are only going to create models that are better at making ersatz "professional" art (images, music, literature, film, whatever). The obvious human response is to cede this ground -- which is creatively worthless anyway -- and make art that's as far removed from generative AI as possible.

I want to switch to a more music-specific focus now and I'm not going to include examples of outsider musicians here. That's partly because of something I'll talk about at the end of this post and partly because the point is for you and me to think about to what extent these things apply to us and whether we want to embrace or reject them. That wouldn't be helped by hearing a lot of examples that might not sound anything like the music we like to make.

One trait that's shared by most, if not all outsiders is a lack of formal technique, or at least of trained technique. A creatively successful musician will always develop a technique of some kind but it's unlikely to match the standard one. On guitar this might manifest as unconventional tunings, modifications and sound-making techniques. "You have to know the rules before you can break them," the mainstream wisdom goes, but the outsider musician hasn't heard of the mainstream wisdom and wouldn't care for it if they did.

Not only did an outsider musician not go to a conservatoire, they may not have had any kind of lessons at all. What's more, they won't have had "apprenticeship" gigs with more experienced musicians, which is a major form of training in traditions like rock music that tend not to be associated with academic pathways.

Indeed, a good way to spot an outsider musician is to look at what "pros" (or would-be pros) put in their biographies -- qualifications, prominent teachers and mentors, sideman gigs, media appearances, gear endorsements, products like online courses and so on -- and expect that to all be completely absent. This is because what an outsider is outside is the artworld -- that social system that decides who is "legit" and who's not. All those things I just listed are ways to prove your legitimacy to the gatekeepers. Outsiders are outside because the gatekeepers won't let 'em in.

The outsider is maximally illegitimate. They don't have their nose pressed up against the window of the music industry -- they reject it wholeheartedly, or even more powerfully just disregard it, considering conventional markers of success orthogonal to their interests. Often this is because that kind of success is not accessible to them but that doesn't mean an outsider practice is just a version of what is now called "cope". At its best, that rejection is a radical gesture that throws into question a whole swathe of social expectations: a critical response to the conflict between legitimation and creativity.

Am I really saying that some people choose outsider status? Probably not often. Historically, outsider artists have often come from poor backgrounds, had physical or mental health conditions or belonged to a disadvantaged group for other reasons, and often it's been some or all of those at once. It's also quite frequent for outsiders to take up their creative practice relatively late in life. All this makes it much harder to build a conventional career.

Outsider status is usually, in one way or another, something that happens to you and what matters most is how you respond to it. Some people just never give up trying to get into the inside, and become sad tryhards clinging to the margins of legitimacy. Some become embittered and give up on their practice, perhaps coming to hate it as the preserve of those whose advantages they lack. But some do the punk thing and decide to plough their own furrow regardless of what anyone else thinks of what they're doing, or whether anyone knows about it at all.

The point of this post is to wonder aloud whether most of us are now outsiders. The digital revolution was supposed to democratize music-making and listening. No more gatekeepers: every website was to be a street corner where someone's playing their music, each equal to the others by being just another URL. But the radical promises of the internet of a decade or two ago have been well and truly recuperated and now too many creative practices have been reduced to the creation of "content" to feed algorithms, with the only reward being views, likes and if you're lucky a few scraps shaved off the ad revenue.

The Recuperation of Outsider Art and Appropriation

Were this a YouTube video essay this would have been the first bit, but it's the least important (I think) so I'm sticking it at the end. Obviously I still think it's worth thinking about, and also I'm aware that some folks reading this will be temporarily lost guitarists who don't know a lot of art history.

Outsider art was given the name "Outsider Art" by the artworld -- collectors, curators and professional artists who fetishized the "energy", "rawness" and "authenticity" of outsider art and sought to take a bit of that for themselves. Outsider art is the category that allows a Darger painting to sell for six figures. It's an old story that isn't worth repeating in all its detail: someone makes something cool and someone else "discovers" it and makes a lot of money. There are plenty of musical examples, too.

I'm not, therefore, advocating for "outsider music" as a marketing term or a tag for Spotify. I don't want to be thinking about whether that would do numbers or not. And I certainly don't want to go and find outsider musicians and appropriate elements of their style to "rough up" my own work and make it more exciting. Don't do those things. Those are insider strategies; if you're reading this you're probably not an insider so stop acting like one.

To be an outsider in 2025 is pretty straightforward. Stop being a musical yes-man: be abrasive and idiosyncratic. Fail continuously, keep making new things even though everything is a failure because success is graded by people who have nothing to do with you. An audience comes through word of mouth, personal relationships and community; even with those people, accept that you'll lose some of them along the way. Do the thing that makes sense for you to do in the place you're in with the people around you, not the thing that will get you money, recognition, status or clicks. When I put it that way I'm not sure why it took me so long to say it but I hope you enjoyed the pictures along the way.